Hero's Send-off For Glenn

TELEVISION

Pbs, A&e, Cnn And Discovery Present Major Specials.

October 25, 1998|By Hal Boedeker, Sentinel Television Critic

PBS' John Glenn, American Hero will be confused with A&E's John Glenn: The All-American Hero. It's inevitable as television stages a Glenn rush - there's gold in this hero - before Thursday's scheduled shuttle launch returns the 77-year-old senator to space.

It's an upbeat story for a country tired of White House scandal, partisan bickering, negative campaigns, endless speculation and market upheavals. The Glenn saga celebrates age and experience, two qualities often undervalued in a youth-fixated culture.

The story has stirred concern too: It's as if ``America's grandfather'' is being sent into space.

In a 60 Minutes interview Sunday, Glenn asked Ed Bradley to explain why the story had captured the public's attention. ``I think that people consider you a product of a simpler era, when there were clear good guys and bad guys'' Bradley said. ``And that you were clearly a good guy, and I think people are pulling for you to do it again.''

The most effective of four major Glenn specials this week, however, focuses on Glenn's 1962 mission to orbit the Earth. Godspeed, John Glenn, premiering Monday at 8 p.m. on the Discovery Channel, traces his dangerous trip aboard Friendship 7 with poignancy and memorable detail.

The special does an excellent job of putting viewers back in that time and reminding them what was at stake in the space race with the Soviets.

A chilling montage, set to ``Fly Me to the Moon,'' shows test rockets crashing and disintegrating at Cape Canaveral. Glenn remembers seeing a missile explode at 35,000 feet ``and it looked like the atomic bomb went off over our heads.''

Before the mission, Glenn took family members on a picnic and asked that they blame no one if he died. Wife Annie Glenn tells of being haunted by the fear that her husband would be lost in space. Seeing so much smoke at liftoff, daughter Lyn thought her dad had blown up.

Walter Cronkite speaks the dramatic narration, which can turn purple. Astronaut Alan Shepard, for example, is described as ``a hotshot Navy test pilot said to have ice in his veins.''

Yet the program vividly describes harrowing moments in Glenn's flight, and writer Howard Benedict suggests that Glenn's death ``could have killed the whole space program.''

Glenn's success elevated him to national hero and marked what Cronkite called ``a giant leap into the future, a giant leap toward the moon.'' But it also led President John Kennedy to ground Glenn, refusing to risk ``a national treasure.''

CNN's The John Glenn Story: A Return to Space, Tuesday at 10 p.m., is more ambitious and diffuse. It jumps back and forth between the 1962 Mercury flight and the upcoming mission.

Cronkite, baseball great Ted Williams and Mercury officials comment on Glenn's remarkable past. Ever the fan of flight, Glenn says, ``You could look at the Wright brothers as the first astronauts.''

The CNN program is admiring but superficial. It touches on Glenn's research into aging in space, yet sidesteps complaints that the mission may have more worth as public relations than science.

A&E Biography and PBS present Glenn profiles tracing his childhood, war heroism, test pilot work and space voyage. Glenn is in both programs, and each notes a heart-rending detail: He had to tell Robert Kennedy's children that their father had died.

The PBS version, Wednesday at 8 p.m. on WMFE-Channel 24, is divided into chapters: warrior, astronaut, politician. But John Glenn, American Hero says little meaningful about his Senate career, and it loses sight of Glenn's story when discussing America's future in space, the space station and a mission to Mars.

To its credit, the PBS documentary notes that many in the science community are skeptical of the validity of Glenn's age research, and the program reminds viewers of the dangers in a shuttle mission.

The documentary ends with narrator Timothy Bottoms asking, ``Why is this 77-year-old flying again? The real answer may be simply because John Glenn is John Glenn. And for most, that will be reason enough.''

Viewers who want more substance will want to see A&E Biography, Tuesday at 8 p.m. It offers a fuller - and sometimes unflattering - picture of Glenn.

CBS News Productions made the quick-paced program, which gives a fond look at Glenn's childhood and lifelong affection for wife Annie. Fearing he was too tall for the astronaut program, he walked around with books on his head to compress his height.

Former astronaut Scott Carpenter calls space flight ``a marvelous experience if you want to pay attention to your soul.'' Other speakers include former Sen. Warren Rudman, former Vice President Walter Mondale and Glenn's son, David.

A&E gives a balanced view of the popular senator's rocky career. Glenn bombed when speaking at the 1976 Democratic convention, and his 1984 run for the presidency was poorly organized.

CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer says that he never remembers the decent Glenn for any issues and that the senator's speaking style won't win any oratorical contests.

But Glenn's passion and grit have won him legions of admirers. Both the A&E and PBS programs contain interviews with persons in the street. A woman in the PBS show says of the 1962 mission, ``We needed a hero at that time, and he was it.''